After a person sits through a long trial—or reads a long book—the last thing he or she wants is an extended, drawn out closing argument. So I will be brief in sharing my final thoughts—not about Avery's or Dassey's guilt or innocence, but about “the system.”

Most people claim to “know” more than they can. And this human tendency toward overconfidence was on full display in Making a Murderer. For example, many people, including the jurors, knew that Steven Avery beat and raped Penny Beerntsen. Even today, some people in the Manitowoc Sheriff's Department still know that Avery is guilty of that crime—or at least they deny knowing that he is innocent—despite DNA evidence proving that Gregory Allen was the real perpetrator. Similarly, with regard to the Teresa Halbach case, a lot of people knew, long before the first piece of evidence was presented in court, that Avery was guilty of that crime, too.

This type of thinking is ill-suited for criminal law. Dean Strang stated in the documentary that “a chase for truth in a criminal trial can be vain.”1 And for that reason, chasing the truth is not the appropriate goal to begin with. As explained in chapter 7, the real question is whether the state has presented sufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But unfortunately, even Wisconsin's official jury instruction promotes the fallacy that we can somehow find, obtain, or otherwise divine the truth of what really happened. The instruction concludes by specifically telling jurors not to do their constitutionally mandated duty. The instruction tells them, “[Y]ou are not to search for doubt. You are to search for the truth.”²

I challenge readers of this book to think of the Avery case in a different way. Stop speculating about the truth, as Wisconsin juries are erroneously instructed to do. The reality is that the Halbach murder was not video recorded, so we may never “know” where she was killed, who killed her, or why someone killed her. Some of these things might have been knowable at one time, but such knowledge could be lost to us forever thanks to the government's sole focus on Avery and its failure to even consider, let alone investigate, any other suspect or scenario for Halbach's murder. Because of this, we may never determine “the truth,” no matter how long we search for it or how hard we think about it.

So instead, think about Making a Murderer in terms of the system we used to arrive at the convictions. And then decide whether, as a society, that system is sufficient to justify convicting Avery, Dassey, and others, and then locking them away for decades or even life.

For example, can we be confident in the outcome of Avery's trial for the Halbach murder knowing that the Manitowoc Sheriff's Department—the agency involved in wrongfully convicting him once before and on the hook for millions of dollars—was intimately involved in the investigation and collection of the evidence against him? Can we be confident in the outcome knowing that the prosecutor was allowed to use PhDs and other so-called experts to cloak his arguments in pseudoscientific certainty? Can we be confident in the outcome knowing that Wisconsin's Denny rule prevented Avery's defense team from arguing or presenting evidence that a specific third party, other than Avery or Dassey, killed Halbach? Can we be confident in the outcome knowing that, although we call our prosecutors “ministers of justice,” the lawyer ethics rules are completely ineffective in constraining their pretrial conduct and their trial tactics? And finally, can we be confident that the jurors were really convinced of Avery's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt when they were instructed “not to search for doubt,” and then rendered an irrational split verdict?

And with regard to Dassey, can we be confident that he raped, tortured, and killed Halbach when his confession was contradicted by the physical evidence and was obtained through interrogation tactics known to produce false confessions in timid, compliant, learning-disabled child suspects? Can we be confident in the outcome of Dassey's trial given that some of his statements—in fact, the most damning of his statements—were the result of his own defense lawyer working with the government in hopes of reaching a plea bargain rather than working against the government with the goal of winning at trial?

In sum, it really is all about the system. Admittedly, it is fun to speculate about the truth of what really happened. But while such speculation is interesting watercooler talk, and may serve to pass the time in an entertaining way, it is at best a fruitless exercise. So regardless of what you think the truth is in the Avery and Dassey cases, set that aside and ask yourself these questions. If you were accused of a crime in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, would you move for a change of venue to another county if you could? And knowing that criminal law and procedure is the same throughout Wisconsin, regardless of the county, would you want to move your case out of state, to another jurisdiction, if you had that option? And even if you could move your case to another state, is that state's system plagued by some of the same problems as Wisconsin's?

If you answered yes to the above questions, then the truth is that we desperately need to rework our criminal justice system from scratch. Such reform would be too late to help Avery and Dassey, but it's not too late to help the next person who will be falsely accused of a crime.